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I had a great conversation with Chris South from Prominence on turning Internal Recruiters into Marketeers. We thought we would both add our ideas about this topic.

We both agreed that it was the direction that recruiters needed to take if they want to improve their career and create sustainability for the internal recruitment function. Importantly, we also agreed that the competencies or skills required to undertake this were readily attainable. Any recruiter considering this direction would require two things the desire to be a marketeer and then the propensity to take action.

Outlined below are our thoughts on the key points that Internal Recruiters need to turn themselves into Marketeers:

1. Brand Perspective

“Brand Perspective – by this I mean, the Internal Recruiter must have a thorough understanding and be able to succinctly describe their organisation’s value proposition. They must have a realistic view of where their brand sits in the market compared to both direct and indirect competitors.”

The way that this competency can be acquired is to:

Understandthe patterns of what types of candidates prefer your organisations to others;

Reviewcompetitors web sites and social media and understand their espoused value propositions;

Reviewinformation in LinkedIn in terms of where employees from your organisation go when they leave and where they come from will give clues;

Surveyprevious jobs applicants to seek their perception of your brand and recruitment process;

Talkto hiring managers to gain their perspective of the market and your direct competitors; and finally

Summariseyour thoughts and circulate them internally for comment. Mind maps are great for this.

2. Market Perspective

“In consumer marketing one of the first exercises to be undertaken is to clearly understand and articulate the businesses’ target audience. As an Internal Recruiter this concept is just as important, because unless you understand the specific breakdown and nuances of your audience your marketing activity is likely to be ineffective.”

Key areas to look at are:

Do your organisations’ recruitment requirements cover more than one demographic? For example your technology team may have a different target demographic to your sales team;

Could you market content to siblings or friends of your target demographic? A recent example being an engineering company that wished to target overseas Engineers. The problem was that Engineers weren’t active on Facebook so the job marketing content was instead targeted to their partners.

3. Influencing Skills

“I believe influencing skills are the mother of all skills. This skill will enable a Recruiter to achieve great things. These skills are defined as the “capacity to persuade, convince, or influence others in order to get them to go along with or support a particular point of view and take action”. This is useful from both an external and internal perspective.”

External Influence

Externally, influence is important because it enables Recruiters to persuade candidates to consider a specific role over many others they are likely considering.

Internal Influence

Internal influence, funnily enough, is the most important. For example, if you are able to convince your internal stakeholders to invest in innovation in terms of technology, improved processes, new concepts or to change behavior then you have a very good chance of advancing in Internal Recruitment.

Looking at some of my colleagues in Internal Recruitment like Rebecca Houghton – Australia Post, Antony Hall – Air New Zealand, James Elliot – Commonwealth Bank and David Bell at GE, they all have very strong abilities in this area.

To Improve Your Influencing Skills I Believe You Need To:

1. Understandwhich stakeholders are the most important and the most influential, there a number of stakeholder matrix tools readily available;

2. Reviewand determine what has worked with important changes in the past, and then determine your path of least resistance;

3. Preparea business case for your idea, this may be a formal case that you document, or simply an elevator pitch on the benefits of your plan;

4. Findpeople who have the ability, capacity and tenacity to mentor you and execute; and

5. Be very practical and keep it simple. David Bell always uses this phrase “your mother should be able to understand”.

4. Prioritisation

Prioritisation – Understand your most critical and scarce positions and give these priority in terms of effort, time and resources.

“If these critical roles are known to be challenging to recruit, avoid wasted time going through the motions of traditional sourcing and instead spend this time with hiring managers to understand the best ways to access and convert this talent.”

5. Mentality

Mentality – Most recruiters have been trained to recruit using online job boards. This has led to a mentality whereby we are accustomed to dealing with high volumes of applicants that have to be filtered to find the best applicants.

“To successfully take action and work like a Marketeer recruiters have to be open to changing this mentality. At the centre of this change is focusing time and effort going straight to pre-identified groups of skilled talent and then to build networks, engage and promote topical content.”

6. Technology

There is new technology entering our industry almost every month, each offering to automate a different part of the recruitment process. Whilst lots of these can be incredibly tempting, knowing which of these are core to successful recruitment is most important.

Marketeers are increasingly needing to have knowledge on tools that previously may have been seen as irrelevant. Such tools include basic graphic design software, content scheduling applications, cost per click and impression advertising platforms and even Google Analytics.

Final Thoughts

I just love the Ten Commandments of an Intrapreneur. You need to be a bit careful in using these rules, as it can make you a bit of a maverick, which can either be good or bad depending on your situation. We wish you luck.

If you want to learn more about how to improve your branding, marketing and recruiting to solve your talent acquisition needs now and in the future, join your peers at ATC2015 in Sydney. Limited spots are still available, here.

About Trevor Vas

Trevor has worked in the Recruitment, Information Technology and the Finance industries in various professional consulting roles. He is a recognised leader in human capital management for large organisations and is an active speaker at industry conferences in Australia and New Zealand. In his previous role, Trevor was the Managing Director of an Australasian consultancy business that consulted and operated Managing Vendors at many of Australia’s and New Zealand’s largest organisations.
Since the establishment of HCMS, Trevor has consulted to BHP, Coles Myer, Crown Casino, ASB Bank and Waitemata and Auckland District Health Boards in relation to their enterprise recruitment models including Recruitment Technology, Recruitment Processes, Preferred Recruitment Supplier Agreements and implementing and optimising Recruitment Centres.
Trevor is a subject matter expert in Recruitment Technology and Resource Management and has assisted many organisations to improve their effectiveness in these areas.

About Chris South

Chris has worked in the recruitment industry for 8 years, where he has been fortunate enough to spend considerable time getting to know the inner workings of three different recruitment sectors construction, technology and energy.
Most recently whilst recruiting high end technical professionals for the oil and gas industry in Houston, Chris was exposed to one of the most challenging labour markets in the world. The sourcing solutions he learnt to apply were far ahead of those that he had been exposed to back home, so he decided to return to New Zealand and share these insights with the local recruitment marketplace.
Now at Prominence Chris focuses on working with both agencies and employers to up-skill recruiters on social recruiting and also to advise on social employment branding. Through Prominence Chris also volunteers at tertiary education facilities to provide real world advice to students and career counsellors on how best to utilise social media for job search purposes.